Why do human beings learn best through experience? Before answering that question, one needs to know about the dynamic behind the human being.
We can be the most logical of animals, we can be the most instinctive of animals, and we can be the most emotional of animals. Instincts do play a neutral part as it clicks with logic and emotions. However, logic and emotion do not click very well with each other. Emotions play as illogical and logic plays as unemotional. They contradict one another.
However, humans cannot thrive on either logic or emotions alone. Therefore, humans are living contradictions. We are paradoxes. Human beings are paradoxes. I do consider myself to be a paradox of paradoxes. Perhaps this is why human beings learn best through experience.
This is from both a logical and emotional perspective.
I would say that most of the things I have learned had come from experience. Experience is usually the best teacher. I can name several situations in which I had to learn from experience.
At the age of twenty, nearing twenty-one, I had started work as a substitute teacher. I could say that it was an interesting two years of my life. While the job is challenging in its own right, I had a few other challenges at hand.
The first challenge was due to my age. I was one of the youngest substitute teachers in the county. I had experienced the downfalls of being one of the youngest substitute teachers in the county. I am not that much older than them. Here I am, having to enforce the same stupid rules that I never liked in the first place.
The second challenge was due to my Asian ethnicity. There were two downfalls to this. The first downfall was that Asians barely age. Despite being twenty at the time, I still looked about seventeen years old.
I still look about seventeen or eighteen at the time. I had experienced how annoying and embarrassing it would get whenever I got stopped in the hallways by faculty members and administrators.
The second downfall was the stereotype associated with Asians. The one big stereotype is the perception that all Asians know martial arts.
I do know martial arts; but, that is a different story. I would be asked these questions such as: “Do you know Kung-Fu?” “Do you know Karate?” “Are you from China?” “Are you from Japan?” I would answer: “I’m from Vietnam.” I had experienced the hardships of being Asian in the southeast United States.
That only made my job tougher. As a substitute teacher, I taught at many different schools. This experienced helped me learn a lot. It had kept me grounded. I had experienced first hand the flaws of the US Education System. I had experienced the flaws of the No Child Left Behind(NCLB) Act.
I would not have truly learned about the flaws of education if I had not experienced first hand.
Logically, I understood the current flaws of American education. Emotionally, it had frustrated me. Combine those two together it seemed to give off a sort of resonance. I could say that I completely understood everything. I got to see the problems first hand. I got to actually experience it. In a sense, I had experienced it instead of just hearing about it.
It made me appreciate the situation more. At the same time, it has given me valuable insight that I could never get from anywhere else. I could say that experience requires those to rely on both logic and emotion.
There was another time in which I did a three-week stint with the John Kerry campaign in 2004. I could say it was an interesting time out of that year. I got to experience a lot of things during that time. One of the things I had experienced was how not to run a campaign operation.
I had also started and run a role-playing board which is a role-playing game in the form of a message forum. From personal experience, I had learned why other boards similar to mine had failed.
I had experienced how certain members managed to cause a ton of damage to my board.
These are a few examples of why we learn best through experience. Through experience we appreciate the seriousness of everything. From my perspective, experience possibly gives us a sense of empathy. But, it all depends on the person. I could say that the acquisition of empathy is importance. The world could use a bit more empathy.
